Critical Youth Studies Reader

This reader begins a conversation about the many aspects of critical youth studies. Chapters in this volume consider essential issues such as class, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, cultural capital, and schooling in creating a dialogue about and a conversation with youth.

This reader begins a conversation about the many aspects of critical youth studies. Chapters in this volume consider essential issues such as class, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, cultural capital, and schooling in creating a dialogue about and a conversation with youth.

In A Critical Youth Studies for the 21st Century Peter Kelly and Annelies Kamp present an edited collection that explores the challenges and opportunities faced by young people in an often dangerous 21st century. In an increasingly globalised world these challenges and opportunities include those associated with widening inequalities, precarious labour markets, the commodification of education, the hopes for democracy, and with practising an identity under these circumstances and in these spaces. Drawing on contemporary critical social theories and diverse methodologies, contributors to the collection, who are established and emerging scholars from the Americas, Europe, and Asia/Pacific, open up discussions about what a critical youth studies can contribute to community, policy and academic debates about these challenges and opportunities. Contributors are: Anna Anderson, Dena Aufseeser, Judith Bessant, Ros Black, Daniel Briggs, Laurie Browne, David Cairns, Perri Campbell, James Côté, Ann Dadich, Maria de Lourdes Beldi Alacantra, Nora Duckett, Deirdre Duffy, Angela Dwyer, Christina Ergler, Michelle Fine, Madeline Fox, Andy Furlong, Theo Gavrielides, Henry Giroux, John Goodwin, Keith Heggart, Luke Howie, Amelia Johns, Annelies Kamp, Peter Kelly, Fengshu Liu, Conor McGuckin, Majella McSharry, Filipa Menezes, Magda Nico, Pam Nilan, Henrietta O'Connor, Jo Pike, Herwig Reiter, Geraldine Scanlon, Keri Schwab, Michael Shevlin, Adnan Selimovic, Joan Smith, Jodie Taylor, Steven Threadgold, Vappu Tyyskä, Brendan Walsh, Lucas Walsh, Rob Watts, Bronwyn Wood, Dan Woodman, and David Zyngier. A Critical Youth Studies for the 21st Century is now available in paperback for individual customers.

Critical studies of youth play an increasingly important role in educational research. This volume adds to that ongoing conversation by addressing the methodological lessons learned from key scholars in the field. With a focus on “the doing” of critical youth studies in ways that center praxis and relational care in work with youth and their communities, the volume showcases scholars discussing their research and reflecting on the practical strategies they have used to operationalize their conceptions of knowledge in youth-centered research projects. Each chapter addresses the research features, challenges, tensions, and debates of the project; engagement with communities; and relationality, reciprocity, and responsibility to participants. The focus throughout is on qualitative approaches that are humanizing, anti-colonial, and transformative.

From youth culture to adolescent sexuality to the consumer purchasing power of children en masse, studies are flourishing. Yet doing research on this unquestionably more vulnerable—whether five or fifteen—population also poses a unique set of challenges and dilemmas for researchers. How should a six-year-old be approached for an interview? What questions and topics are appropriate for twelve year olds? Do parents need to give their approval for all studies? In Representing Youth, Amy L. Best has assembled an important group of essays from some of today’s top scholars on the subject of youth that address these concerns head on, providing scholars with thoughtful and often practical answers to their many methodological concerns. These original essays range from how to conduct research on youth in ways that can be empowering for them, to issues of writing and representation, to respecting boundaries and to dealing with issues of risk and responsibility to those interviewed. For anyone doing research or working with children and young adults, Representing Youth offers an indispensable guide to many of the unique dilemmas that research with kids entails. Contributors include: Amy L. Best, Sari Knopp Biklen, Elizabeth Chin, Susan Driver, Marc Flacks, Kathryn Gold Hadley, Madeline Leonard, C.J. Pascoe, Rebecca Raby, Alyssa Richman, Jessica Taft, Michael Ungar, Yvonne Vissing, and Stephani Etheridge Woodson.

The burgeoning field of youth studies encompasses multiple viewpoints, presenting a confusing picture to novices and experts alike. This insightful text goes to the heart of the fundamental issues and debates that characterize this developing field, giving readers a clearer understanding of its current progress and future prospects. James Côté's lively, debate-focused overview of the underlying paradigms and theories in youth studies - drawn from the overlapping disciplines of sociology, psychology and cultural studies – functions both as an introduction to the area and as an exercise in critical thinking, putting its readers on the cutting-edge of the field. The chapters move from identifying the key 'threshold meta-concepts' that influence research, to showing readers how to critically evaluate key debates in areas that are central to students' lives, including education, work, family, technologies, youth culture, identity and politics. Youth Studies is the ideal companion to youth-related degree programmes and to youth modules in sociology, social work, social policy, psychology and other related disciplines.

The failure of current policy to address important quality of life issues for urban youth remains a substantial barrier to civic participation, educational equity, and healthy adulthood. This volume brings together the work of leading urban youth scholars to highlight the detrimental impact of zero tolerance policies on young people’s educational experience and well being. Inspired by the conviction that urban youth have the right to more equitable educational and social resources and political representation, Beyond Resistance! offers new insights into how to increase the effectiveness of youth development and education programs, and how to create responsive youth policies at the local, state, and federal level.

This volume of transformed research utilizes an activist approach to examine the notion that nothing is apolitical. Research projects themselves are critically examined for power orientations, even as they are used to address curricular problems and educational or societal issues.

What does it mean to be young, to be economically disadvantaged, and to be subject to constant surveillance both from the formal agencies of the state and from the informal challenge of competing youth groups? What is life like for young people living on the fringe of global cities in late modernity, no longer at the center of city life, but pushed instead to new and insecure margins of the urban inner city? How are changing patterns of migration and work, along with shifting gender roles and expectations, impacting marginalized youth in the radically transformed urban city of the twenty-first century? In Lost Youth in the Global City, Jo-Anne Dillabough and Jacqueline Kennelly focus on young people who live at the margins of urban centers, the "edges" where low-income, immigrant, and other disenfranchised youth are increasingly finding and defining themselves. Taking the imperative of multi-sited ethnography and urban youth cultures as a starting point, this rich and layered book offers a detailed exploration of the ways in which these groups of young people, marked by economic disadvantage and ethnic and religious diversity, have sought to navigate a new urban terrain and, in so doing, have come to see themselves in new ways. By giving these young people shape and form – both looking across their experiences in different cities and attending to their particularities – Lost Youth in the Global City sets a productive and generative agenda for the field of critical youth studies.